Metamorphoses of the SoulPaths of Experience Vol. 1

Schmidt Number: S-2116

On-line since: 15th January, 2008

LECTURE 2
The Mission of Anger

Munich, 5th December 1909

When
we penetrate more deeply into the human soul and consider its nature
from the point of view here intended, we are repeatedly reminded of the
ancient saying by the Greek sage, Heraclitus
[ 16 ]:
“Never will you find
the boundaries of the soul, by whatever paths you search; so all-embracing is
the soul's being.” We shall be speaking here of the soul and its life,
not from the standpoint of contemporary psychology, but from that of
Spiritual Science. Spiritual Science stands firmly for the real existence of
a spiritual world behind all that is revealed to the senses and through them
to the mind. It regards this spiritual world as the source and foundation of
external existence and holds that the investigation of it lies within the
reach of man.

In lectures
given here, the difference between Spiritual Science and the many other
standpoints of the present day has often been brought out; and need be
mentioned only briefly now. In ordinary life and in ordinary science it is
habitually assumed that human knowledge has certain boundaries and that the
human mind cannot know anything beyond them. Spiritual Science holds
that these boundaries are no more than temporary. They can be extended;
faculties hidden in the soul can be called forth, and then, just as a man
born blind who gains his sight through an operation emerges from darkness
into a world of light and colour, so it is with a person whose hidden
faculties awake. He will break through into a spiritual world which is always
around us but cannot be directly known until the appropriate spiritual organs
for perceiving it have been developed. Spiritual Science asks: How are we to
transform ourselves in order to penetrate into this world and to gain a
comprehensive experience of it? And Spiritual Science must ever and again
point to the great event which enables a man to become a spiritual
investigator and so to direct his gaze into the spiritual worlds, even as a
physicist sees into the physical world through his microscope. Goethe's words
are certainly valid in their bearing on the spiritual world:

Of course, the
investigator in the sense of Spiritual Science has no such instrumental aids.
He has to transform his soul into an instrument; then he experiences that
great moment when his soul is awakened and the spiritual world around him
reveals itself to his perception. Again, it has often been emphasised here
that not everyone needs to be a spiritual investigator in order to appreciate
what the awakened man has to impart. When knowledge resulting from spiritual
research is communicated, no more is required of the listener than ordinary
logic and an unbiased sense of truth. Investigation calls for the opened eye
of the clairvoyant; recognition of what is communicated calls for a healthy
sense of truth; natural feeling unclouded by prejudice; natural good sense.
The point is that teachings and observations concerning the soul should be
understood in the light of this spiritual research when in later lectures we
come to speak of some of the humanly interesting characteristics of the soul.
Just as anyone who wants to study hydrogen or oxygen or any other chemical
substance has to acquire certain capabilities, so is observation of the life
of the soul possible only for someone whose spiritual eye has been opened.
The investigator of the soul must be in a position to make observations in
soul-substance, so to speak. We must certainly not think of the soul
as something vague and nebulous in which feelings, thoughts and volitions are
whirling about. Let us rather remind ourselves of what has been said on this
subject in previous lectures.

Man, as he
stands before us, is a far more complicated being than he is held to be by
exoteric science. For Spiritual Science, the knowledge drawn from external
physical observation covers only a part of man — the external physical
body which he has in common with all his mineral surroundings. Here, the same
laws apply as in the external physical-mineral world, and the same substances
function. As a result of observation, however, and not on the strength merely
of logical inference, Spiritual Science recognises, beyond the physical body,
a second member of man's being: we call it the etheric body or life-body.
Only a brief reference can here be made to the etheric body — our task
today is quite different — but knowledge of the underlying members of
the human organism is the foundation on which we have to build. Man has an
etheric body in common with everything that lives. As I said, only the
spiritual investigator, who has transformed his soul into an instrument for
seeing into the spiritual world, can directly observe the etheric body. But
its existence can be acknowledged by a healthy sense of truth, unclouded by
contemporary prejudices. Take the physical body: it harbours the same
physical and chemical laws that prevail in the external physical-mineral
world. When are these physical laws revealed to us? When we have
before us a lifeless human being. When a human being has passed through the
gate of death, we see what the laws that govern the physical body really are.
They are the laws that lead to the decomposition of the physical body; their
effect on it is now quite different from their action during life. They are
always present in the physical body; the reason why the living body does not
obey them is that during life an antagonist of dissolution, the etheric or
life-body, is also present and active there.

A third member
of the human organism can now be distinguished: the vehicle of pleasure and
pain, of urges, desires and passions — of everything we associate with
the emotional activities of the soul. Man has this vehicle in common with all
beings who possess a certain form of consciousness: with the animals. Astral
body, or body of consciousness, is the name we give to this third member of
the human organism.

This completes
what we may call the bodily nature of man, with its three components:
physical body, etheric body or life-body, astral or consciousness-body.

Within these
three members we recognise something else; something unique to man, through
which he has risen to the summit of creation. It has often been remarked that
our language has one little word which guides us directly to man's inner
being, whereby he ranks as the crown of earthly creation. These flowers here,
the desk, the clock — anyone can name these objects; but there is one
word we can never hear spoken by another with reference to ourselves; it must
spring from our own inner being. This is the little name ‘I’. If
you are to call yourself ‘I’, this ‘I’ must sound
forth from within yourself and must designate your inmost being. Hence the
great religions and philosophies have always regarded this name as the
‘unspeakable name’ of that which cannot be designated from
outside. Indeed, with this designation ‘I’, we stand before that
innermost being of man which can be called the divine element in him. We do
not thereby make man a god. If we say that a drop of water from the sea is of
like substance with the ocean, we are not making the drop into a sea.
Similarly, we are not making the ‘I’ a god when we say it is of
like substance with the divine being that permeates and pulses through the
world.

Through his
inner essence, man is subject to a certain phenomenon which Spiritual Science
treats as real and serious in the full sense of the words. Its very name
fascinates people today, but in its application to man it is given full rank
and worth only by Spiritual Science. It is the fact of existence that we call
‘evolution’. How fascinating is the effect of this word on modern
man, who can point to lower forms of life which evolve gradually into higher
stages; how enchanting when it can be said that man himself has evolved from
those lower forms to his present height! Spiritual Science takes evolution
seriously in relation, above all, to man. It calls attention to the fact that
man, since he is a self-conscious being with an inner activity springing from
the centre of his being, should not limit his idea of evolution to a mere
observation of the imperfect developing towards the more nearly perfect. As
an active being he must himself take hold of his own evolution. He must raise
himself to higher stages than the stage he has already reached; he must
develop ever-new forces, so that he may approach continually towards
perfection. Spiritual Science takes a sentence, first formulated not very
long ago, and now recognised as valid in another realm, and applies it on a
higher level to human evolution. Most people today are not aware that as late
as the beginning of the 17th century the learned as well as the laity
believed that the lower animals were born simply out of river-mud. This
belief arose from imprecise observation, and it was the great natural
scientist, Francesco Redi,
[ 18 ]
who in the 17th century first championed the
statement: Life can arise only from the living. Naturally, this statement is
quoted here in the modern sense, with all necessary qualifications. No-one,
of course, now believes that any lower animal — say an earth-worm
— can grow out of river-mud. For an earth-worm to come into existence,
the germ of an earth-worm must first be there. And yet, in the 17th century,
Francesco Redi narrowly escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno,
[ 19 ]
for his statement had made him a terrible heretic.

This sort of
treatment is not usually inflicted on heretics today, at least not in all
parts of the world, but there is a modern substitute for it. If anyone
upholds something which contradicts the belief of those who, in their
arrogance, suppose they have reached the summit of earthly wisdom, he is
looked on as a visionary, a dreamer, if nothing worse. That is the
contemporary form of inquisition in our parts of the world. Be it so.
Nevertheless, what Spiritual Science says concerning phenomena on higher
levels will come to be accepted equally with Francesco Redi's statement
regarding the lower levels. Even as he asserted that “life can issue
only from the living”, so does Spiritual Science state that “soul
and spirit can issue only from soul and spirit”. And the law of
reincarnation, so often ridiculed today as the outcome of crazy fantasy, is
in fact a consequence of this statement. Nowadays, when people see, from the
first day of a child's birth, the soul and spirit developing out of the
bodily element; when they see increasingly definite facial traits emerging
from an undifferentiated physiognomy, movements becoming more and more
individual, talents and abilities showing forth — many people still
believe that all this springs from the physical existence of father, mother,
grandparents; in short, from physical ancestry.

This belief
derives from inexact observation, just as did the belief that earth-worms
originate from mud. Present-day sense-observation is incapable of
tracing back to its soul-spiritual origin the soul and spirit that are
manifest before our eyes today. Hence the laws of physical heredity are made
to account for phenomena which apparently emerge from the obscure depths of
the physical. Spiritual Science looks back to previous lives on earth, when
the talents and characteristics that are evident in the present life were
foreshadowed. And we regard the present life as the source of new formative
influences that will bear fruit in future earthly lives.

Francesco Redi's
statement has now become an obvious truth, and the time is not far distant
when the corresponding statement by Spiritual Science will be regarded as
equally self-evident — with the difference that Francesco Redi's
statement is of restricted interest, while the statement by Spiritual Science
concerns everyone: “Soul and spirit develop from soul and spirit; man
does not live once only but passes through repeated lives on earth; every
life is the result of earlier lives and the starting point of numerous
subsequent lives.” All confidence in life, all certainty in our work,
the solution of all the riddles facing us — it all depends on this
knowledge. From this knowledge man will draw ever-increasing strength
for his existence, together with confidence and hope when he looks towards
the future.

Now what is it
that originates in earlier lives, works on from life to life, and maintains
itself through all its sojourns on earth? It is the Ego, the ‘I’,
designated by the name which a person can bestow on no-one but himself. The
human Ego goes from life to life, and in so doing fulfils its
evolution.

But how is this evolution
brought about? By the Ego working on the three lower members of the human
being. We have first the astral body, the vehicle of pleasure and pain, of
joy and sorrow, of instinct, desire and passion. Let us look at a person on a
low level, whose Ego has done little, as yet, to cleanse his astral body and
so is still its slave. In a person who stands higher we find that his Ego has
worked upon his astral body in such a way that his lower instincts, desires
and passions have been transmuted into moral ideals, ethical judgments. From
this contrast we can gain a first impression of how the Ego works upon the
astral body.

In every human
being it is possible to distinguish the part of the astral body on which the
Ego has not yet worked from the part which the Ego has consciously
transformed. The transmuted part is called Spirit-Self, or Manas. The Ego may
grow stronger and stronger and will then transmute the etheric body or
life-body. Life-spirit is the name we give to the transformed etheric
body. Finally, when the Ego acquires such strength that it is able to extend
its transforming power into the physical body, we call the transmuted part
Atma, or the real Spirit-man.

So far we have
been speaking of conscious work by the Ego. In the far-distant past, long
before the Ego was capable of this conscious work, it worked unconsciously
— or rather sub-consciously — on the three bodies or sheaths of
man. The astral body was the first to be worked on in this way, and its
transmuted part we call the Sentient Soul, the first of man's soul-members.
So it was that the Ego, working from the inner being of man, created the
Sentient Soul at a time when man lacked the requisite degree of consciousness
for transmuting his instincts, desires and so forth. In the etheric body the
Ego created unconsciously the Mind-Soul or Intellectual Soul. Again,
working unconsciously on the physical body, the Ego created the inner
soul-organ that we call the Consciousness Soul. For Spiritual Science, the
human soul is not a vague, nebulous something, but an essential part of man's
being, consisting of three distinct soul-members — Sentient Soul,
Mind-Soul, Consciousness Soul — within which the Ego is actively
engaged.

Let us try to
form an idea of these three soul-members. The spiritual investigator knows
them by direct observation, but we can approach them also by means of
rational thinking. For example, suppose we have a rose before us. We perceive
it, and as long as we perceive it we are receiving an impression from
outside. We call this a perception of the rose. If we turn our eyes away, an
inner image of the rose remains with us. We must carefully distinguish these
two moments: the moment when we are looking at the rose and the moment when
we are able to retain an image of it as an inner possession, although we are
no longer perceiving it.

This point must
be emphasised because of the incredible notions brought forward in this
connection by 19th century philosophy. We need think only of Schopenhauer,
[ 20 ]
whose philosophy begins with the words: The world is my idea. Hence we
must be clear as to the difference between percepts and concepts, or mental
images. Every sane man knows the difference between the concept of white-hot
steel, which cannot burn him, and white-hot steel itself, which can.
Perceptions bring us into communication with the external world; concepts are
a possession of the soul. The boundary between inner experience and the outer
world can be precisely drawn. Directly we begin to experience something
inwardly, we owe it to the Sentient Soul — as distinct from the
sentient body, which brings us our percepts and enables us to perceive, for
example, the rose and its colour. Thus our concepts are formed in the
Sentient Soul, and the Sentient Soul is the bearer also of our sympathies and
antipathies, of the feelings that things arouse in us. When we call the rose
beautiful, this inward experience is a property of the Sentient
Soul.

Anyone who is
unwilling to distinguish percepts from concepts should remember the white-hot
steel that burns and the concept of it, which does not. Once, when I had said
this, someone objected that a man might be able to suggest to himself the
thought of lemonade so vividly that he would experience its taste on his
tongue. I replied: Certainly this might be possible, but whether the
imaginary lemonade would quench his thirst is another question. The boundary
between external reality and inner experience can indeed always be
determined. Directly inner experience begins, the Sentient Soul, as distinct
from the sentient body, comes into play.

A higher
principle is brought into being by the work of the Ego on the etheric body:
we call it the Mind-Soul, or Intellectual Soul. We shall have more to
say about it in the lecture on the Mission of Truth; today we are concerned
especially with the Sentient Soul. Through the Intellectual Soul man is
enabled to do more than carry about with him the experiences aroused in him
by his perceptions of the outer world. He takes these experiences a stage
further. Instead of merely keeping his perceptions alive as images in the
Sentient Soul, he reflects on them and devotes himself to them; they form
themselves into thoughts and judgments, into the whole content of his mind.
This continued cultivation of impressions received from the outer world is
the work of what we call the Intellectual Soul or Mind-soul.

A third
principle is brought into being when the Ego has created in the physical body
the organs whereby it is enabled to go out from itself and to connect its
judgments, ideas and feelings with the external world. This principle we call
the Consciousness Soul, because the Ego is then able to transform its inner
experiences into conscious knowledge of the outer world. When we give form to
the feelings we experience, so that they enlighten us concerning the outer
world, our thoughts, judgments and feelings become knowledge of the outer
world. Through the Consciousness Soul we explore the secrets of the outer
world as human beings endowed with knowledge and cognition.

So does the Ego
work continually in the Sentient Soul, in the Intellectual or Mind-Soul,
and in the Consciousness Soul, releasing the forces inwardly bound up
there and enabling man to advance in his evolution by enriching his
capacities. The Ego is the actor, the active being through whose agency man
himself takes control of his evolution and progresses from life to life,
remedying the defects of former lives and widening the faculties of his soul.
Such is human evolution from life to life; it consists first of all in the
Ego's work on the soul in its threefold aspect.

We must,
however, recognise clearly that in its work the Ego has the character of a
“two-edged sword”. Yes, this human Ego is, on the one hand, the
element in man's being through which alone he can be truly man. If we lacked
this central point, we should be merged passively with the outer world. Our
concepts and ideas have to be taken hold of in this centre; more and more of
them must be experienced; and our inner life must be increasingly enriched by
impressions from the outer world. Man is truly man to the degree in which his
Ego becomes richer and more comprehensive. Hence the Ego must seek to enrich
itself in the course of succeeding lives; it must become a centre whereby man
is not simply part of the outer world but acts as a stimulating force upon
it. The richer the fund of his impulses, the more he has absorbed and the
more he radiates from the centre of his individual self, the nearer he
approaches to being truly man.

That is one
aspect of the Ego; and we are in duty bound to endeavour to make the Ego as
rich and as many-sided as we can. But the reverse side of this
progress is manifest in what we call selfishness or egoism. If these words
were taken as catchwords and it were said that human beings must become
selfless, that of course would be bad, as any use of catchwords always is. It
is indeed man's task to enrich himself inwardly, but this does not imply a
selfish hardening of the Ego and a shutting off of itself with its riches
from the world. In that event a man would indeed become richer and richer,
but he would lose his connection with the world. His enrichment would signify
that the world had no more to give him, nor he the world. In the course of
time he would perish, for while striving to enrich his Ego he would keep it
all for himself and would become isolated from the world. This caricature of
development would impoverish a man's Ego to an increasing extent, for
selfishness lays a man inwardly waste. So is it that the Ego, as it works in
the three members of the soul, acts as a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it
must work to become always richer, a powerful centre from which much can
stream forth; but on the other hand it must bring everything it absorbs back
into harmony with the outer world. To the same degree that it develops its
own resources, it must go out from itself and relate itself to the whole of
existence. It must become simultaneously an independent being and a selfless
one. Only when the Ego works in these two apparently contradictory directions
— when on one side it enriches itself increasingly and on the other
side becomes selfless — can human evolution go forward so as to be
satisfying for man and health-giving for the whole of existence. The Ego has
to work on each of three soul-members in such a way that both sides of human
development are kept in balance.

Now the work of
the Ego in the soul leads to its own gradual awakening. Development occurs in
all forms of life, and we find that the three members of the human soul are
today at very different stages of evolution. The Sentient Soul, the bearer of
our emotions and impulses and of all the feelings that are aroused by direct
stimuli from the outer world, is the most strongly developed of the three.
But at certain lower stages of evolution the content of the Sentient Soul is
experienced in a dull, dim way, for the Ego is not yet fully awake. When a
man works inwardly on himself and his soul-life progresses, the Ego becomes
more and more clearly conscious of itself. But as far as the Sentient Soul is
awake, the Ego is hardly more than a brooding presence within it. The Ego
gains in clarity when man advances to a richer life in the Intellectual Soul,
and achieves full clarity in the Consciousness Soul. Man then comes to be
aware of himself as an individual who stands apart from his environment and
is active in gaining objective knowledge of it. This is possible only when
the Ego is awake in the Consciousness Soul.

Thus we have the
Ego only dimly awake in the Sentient Soul. It is swept along by waves of
pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, and can scarcely be perceived as an
entity. In the Intellectual Soul, when clearly defined ideas and judgments
are developed, the Ego first gains clarity, and achieves full clarity in the
Consciousness Soul.

Hence we can
say: Man has a duty to educate himself through his Ego and so to further his
own inner progress. But at the time of its awakening the Ego is still given
over to the waves of emotion that surge through the Sentient Soul. Is there
anything in the Sentient Soul which can contribute to the education of the
Ego at a time when the Ego is still incapable of educating itself?

We shall see how
in the Intellectual Soul there is something which enables the Ego to take its
own education in hand. In the Sentient Soul this is not yet possible; the Ego
must be guided by something which arises independently within the Sentient
Soul. We will single out this one element in the Sentient Soul and consider
its two-sided mission for educating the Ego, This element is one to
which the strongest objection may perhaps be taken — the emotion we
call anger. Anger arises in the Sentient Soul when the Ego is still dormant
there. Or can it be said that we stand in a self-conscious relation to anyone
if their behaviour causes us to flare up in anger?

Let us picture
the difference between two persons: two teachers, let us say. One of them has
achieved the clarity which makes for enlightened inner judgments. He sees
what his pupil is doing wrong but is not perturbed by it, because his
Intellectual Soul is mature. With his Consciousness Soul, also, he is calmly
aware of the child's error, and if necessary he can prescribe an appropriate
penalty, not impelled by any emotional reaction but in accordance with
ethical and pedagogical judgment. It will be otherwise with a teacher whose
Ego has not reached the stage that would enable him to remain calm and
discerning. Not knowing what to do, he flares up in anger at the child's
misdemeanour.

Is such anger
always inappropriate to the event that calls it forth? No, not always. And
this is something we must keep in mind. Before we are capable of judging an
event in the light of the Intellectual Soul or the Consciousness Soul, the
wisdom of evolution has provided for us to be overcome by emotion because of
that event. Something in our Sentient Soul is activated by an event in the
outer world. We are not yet capable of making the right response as an act of
judgment, but we can react from the emotional centre of the Sentient Soul. Of
all things that the Sentient Soul experiences, let us therefore consider
anger.

It points to
what will come about in the future. To begin with, anger expresses a judgment
of some event in the outer world; then, having learnt unconsciously through
anger to react to something wrong, we advance gradually to enlightened
judgments in our higher souls. So in certain respects anger is an educator.
It arises in us as an inner experience before we are mature enough to form an
enlightened judgment of right and wrong. This is how we should look on the
anger which can flare up in a young man, before he is capable of a considered
judgment, at the sight of injustice or folly which violates his ideals; and
then we can properly speak of a righteous anger. No-one does better at
acquiring an inner capacity for sound judgment than a man who has started
from a state of soul in which he could be moved to righteous anger by
anything ignoble, immoral or crazy. That is how anger has the mission of
raising the Ego to higher levels. On the other hand, since man is to become a
free being, everything human can degenerate. Anger can degenerate into rage
and serve to gratify the worst kind of egoism. This must be so, if man is to
advance towards freedom. But we must not fail to realise that the very thing
which can lapse into evil may, when it manifests in its true significance,
have the mission of furthering the progress of man. It is because man can
change good into evil, that good qualities, when they are developed in the
right way, can become a possession of the Ego. So is anger to be understood
as the harbinger of that which can raise man to calm
self-possession.

But although
anger is on the one hand an educator of the Ego, it also serves strangely
enough, to engender selflessness. What is the Ego's response when anger
overcomes it at the sight of injustice or folly? Something within us speaks
out against the spectacle confronting us. Our anger illustrates the fact that
we are up against something in the outer world. The Ego then makes its
presence felt and seeks to safeguard itself against this outer event. The
whole content of the Ego is involved. If the sight of injustice or folly were
not to kindle a noble anger in us, the events in the outer world would carry
us along with them as an easy-going spectator; we would not feel the sting of
the Ego and we would have no concern for its development. Anger enriches the
Ego and summons it to confront the outer world, yet at the same time it
induces selflessness. For if anger is such that it can be called noble and
does not lapse into blind rage, its effect is to damp down Ego-feeling
and to produce something like powerlessness in the soul. If the soul
is suffused with anger, its own activity becomes increasingly
suppressed.

This experience
of anger is wonderfully well brought out in the vernacular use of
sich giften,
to poison oneself,
as a phrase meaning “to get angry”. This is an example of how
popular imagination arrives at a truth which may often elude the
learned.

Anger which eats
into the soul is a poison; it damps down the Ego's self-awareness and
so promotes selflessness. Thus we see how anger serves to teach both
independence and selflessness; that is its dual mission as an educator of
humanity, before the Ego is ripe to undertake its own education. If we were
not enabled by anger to take an independent stand, in cases where the outer
world offends our inner feeling, we would not be selfless, but dependent and
Ego-less in the worst sense.

For the
spiritual scientist, anger is also the harbinger of something quite
different. Life shows us that a person who is unable to flare up with anger
at injustice or folly will never develop true kindness and love. Equally, a
person who educates himself through noble anger will have a heart abounding
in love, and through love he will do good. Love and kindness are the obverse
of noble anger. Anger that is overcome and purified will be transformed into
the love that is its counterpart. A loving hand is seldom one that has never
been clenched in response to injustice or folly. Anger and love are
complementary.

A superficial
Theosophy might say: Yes, a man must overcome his passions; he must cleanse
and purify them. But overcoming something does not mean shirking or shunning
it. It is a strange sort of sacrifice that is made by someone who proposes to
cast off his passionate self by evading it. We cannot sacrifice something
unless we have first possessed it. Anger can be overcome only by someone who
has experienced it first within himself. Instead of trying to evade such
emotions, we must transmute them in ourselves. By transmuting anger, we rise
from the Sentient Soul, where noble anger can flame out, to the Intellectual
Soul and the Consciousness Soul, where love and the power to give blessing
are born.

Transmuted anger
is love in action. That is what we learn from reality. Anger in moderation
has the mission of leading human beings to love; we can call it the teacher
of love. And not in vain do we call the undefined power that flows from the
wisdom of the world and shows itself in the righting of wrongs the
“wrath of God”, in contrast to God's love. But we know that these
two things belong together; without the other, neither can exist. In life
they require and determine each other.

Now let us see
how in art and poetry, when they are great, the primal wisdom of the world is
revealed.

When we come to
speak of the mission of truth, we shall see how Goethe's thoughts on this
subject are clearly expressed in his
Pandora,
one of his finest poems, though
small in scale. And in a powerful poem of universal significance, the
Prometheus Bound
by Aeschylus, we
are brought to see, though perhaps less clearly, the role of anger as a
phenomenon in world history.

Probably you
know the legend on which Aeschylus based his drama. Prometheus is a
descendant of the ancient race of Titans, who had succeeded the first
generation of gods in the evolution of the earth and of humanity. Ouranus and
Gaia belong to the first generation of gods. Ouranus is succeeded by Kronos
(Saturn). Then the Titans are overthrown by the third generation of gods, led
by Zeus. Prometheus, though a descendant of the Titans, was on the side of
Zeus in the battle against the Titans and so could be called a friend of
Zeus, but he was only half a friend. When Zeus took over the rulership of the
earth — so the legend continues — humanity had advanced far
enough to enter on a new phase, while the old faculties possessed by men in
ancient times were dying out. Zeus wanted to exterminate mankind and install
a new race on earth, but Prometheus resolved to give men the means of further
progress. He brought them speech and writing, knowledge of the outer world,
and, finally, fire, in order that by learning to master these tools humanity
might raise itself from the low level to which it had sunk.

If we look more
deeply into the story, we find that everything bestowed by Prometheus on
mankind is connected with the human Ego, while Zeus is portrayed as a divine
power which inspires and ensouls men in whom the Ego has not yet come to full
expression. If we look back over the evolution of the earth, we find in the
far past a humanity in which the Ego was no more than an obscurely brooding
presence. It had to acquire certain definite faculties with which to educate
itself. The gifts that Zeus could bestow were not adapted to furthering the
progress of mankind. In respect of the astral body, and of everything in man
apart from his Ego, Zeus is the giver. Because Zeus was not capable of
promoting the development of the Ego, he resolved to wipe out mankind. All
the gifts brought by Prometheus, on the other hand, enabled the Ego to
educate itself. Such is the deeper meaning of the legend.

Prometheus,
accordingly, is the one who enables the Ego to set to work on enriching and
enlarging itself; and that is exactly how the gifts bestowed by Prometheus
were understood in ancient Greece.

Now we have seen
that if the Ego concentrates on this single aim, it finally impoverishes
itself, for it will be shutting itself off from the outer world. Enriching
itself is one side only of the Ego's task. It has to go out and bring its
inner wealth into harmony with the world around it, if it is not to be
impoverished in the long run. Prometheus could bestow on men only the gifts
whereby the Ego could enrich itself. Thus, inevitably, he challenged the
powers which act from out of the entire cosmos to subdue the Ego in the right
way, so that it may become self less and thus develop its other aspect. The
independence of the Ego, achieved under the sting of anger on the one hand,
and on the other the damping down of the Ego when a man consumes his anger,
as it were, and his Ego is deadened — this whole process is presented
in the historic pictures of the conflict between Prometheus and
Zeus.

Prometheus
endows the Ego with faculties which enable it to become richer and richer.
What Zeus has to do is to produce the same effect that anger has in the
individual. Thus the wrath of Zeus falls on Prometheus and extinguishes the
power of the Ego in him. The legend tells us how Prometheus is punished by
Zeus for the untimely stimulus he had given to the advancement of the human
Ego. He is chained to a rock.

The suffering
thus endured by the human Ego and its inner rebellion are magnificently
expressed by Aeschylus in this poetic drama.

So we see the
representative of the human Ego subdued by the wrath of Zeus. Just as the
individual human Ego is checked and driven back on itself when it has to
swallow its anger, so is Prometheus chained by the wrath of Zeus, meaning
that his activity is reduced to its proper level. When a flood of anger
sweeps through the soul of an individual, his Ego, striving for
self-expression, finds itself enchained; so was the Promethean Ego chained
to a rock.

That is the
peculiar merit of this legend: it presents in powerful pictures
far-reaching truths which are valid both for individuals and for humanity
at large. People could see in these pictures what had to be experienced in
the individual soul. Thus in Prometheus chained to the Caucasian rock
we can see a representative of the human Ego at a time when the Ego, striving
to advance from its brooding somnolence in the Sentient Soul, is restrained
by its fetters from indulging in wild extravagance.

We are then told
how Prometheus knows that the wrath of Zeus will be silenced when he is
overthrown by the son of a mortal. He will be succeeded in his rulership by
someone born of mortal man. The Ego is released by the mission of anger on a
lower plane, and the immortal Ego, the immortal human soul, will be born from
mortal man on a higher plane. Prometheus looks forward to the time when Zeus
will be succeeded by Christ Jesus, and the individual Ego will itself be
transformed into the loving Ego when the noble anger that fettered it is
transformed into love. We behold the birth from the Ego enchained by anger of
that other Ego, whose action in the outer world will be that of love and
blessing. So, too, we behold the birth of a God of love who tends and
cherishes the Ego; the very Ego that in earlier times was fettered by the
anger of Zeus, so that it should not transgress its proper bounds.

Hence we see in
the continuation of this legend an external picture of human evolution. We
must ourselves take hold of this myth in such a way that it gives us a living
picture, universally relevant, of how the individual experiences the
transformation of the Ego, educated by the mission of anger, into the
liberated Ego imbued with love. Then we understand what the legend does and
what Aeschylus made of his material. We feel the soul's life-blood
pulsing through us; we feel it in the continuation of the legend and in the
dramatic form given to it by Aeschylus. So we find in this Greek drama
something like a practical application of processes we can experience in our
own souls. This is true of all great poems and other works of art: they
spring from typical great experiences of the human soul.

We have seen
today how the Ego is educated through the purification of a passion. In the
next lecture we shall see how the Ego becomes ripe to educate itself in the
Intellectual Soul by learning to grasp the mission of truth on a higher
plane. We have seen also how in our considerations today the saying of
Heraclitus is borne out: “You will never find the boundaries of the
soul, by whatever paths you search for them; so wide and deep is the being of
the soul.”

Yes, it is true
that the soul's being is so far-reaching that we cannot directly
sound its depths. But Spiritual Science, with the opened eye of the seer,
leads into the substance of the soul, and we can progress further and further
into fathoming the mysterious being that the human soul is when we
contemplate it through the eyes of the spiritual scientist. On the one hand
we can truly say: The soul has unfathomable depths, but if we take this
saying in full earnest we can add: The boundaries of the soul are indeed so
wide that we have to search for them by all possible paths, but we can hope
that by extending these boundaries ourselves, we shall progress further and
further in our knowledge of the soul.

This ray of hope
will illumine our search for knowledge if we accept the true words of
Heraclitus not with resignation but with confidence: The boundaries of the
soul are so wide that you may search along every path and not reach them, so
comprehensive is the being of the soul.

Let us try to
grasp this comprehensive being; it will lead us on further and further
towards a solution of the riddles of existence.